Even before I heard it, I knew it was there, a new resonance that seemed to come, not from the Links, where the Highland Games were just about to begin, but from somewhere in myself: soft, at first, then harder, but still not quite audible, a pure rhythm that felt deeper than sound, building in the pit of my stomach until, finally, I heard it. I looked up at my mother, and she smiled; this was her favourite day of the entire year, not because she was particularly interested in hammer throwing or tartanry, but because we were in Burntisland, one of a handful of places whose scents and sounds brought back memories from happier days, when she would come here with her parents on day trips.
Minutes later, we were there, folding into the crowd, heads turning when a larger than usual strongman came striding through the sea of bodies, or when we spotted a particularly colourful band of dancers in green or red or blue velvet vests and Aboyne dresses, sitting in tidy rows on a bench by one of the stages, or standing in a tight cluster, preparing for their event. Every now and then, a pipe band would start up and I would be drawn in again, not to the sound of the bagpipes so much as to the drums, a live sound that seemed to rise up out of the earth itself to claim me physically, spiritually. That sound still moves me every time I hear it: a call to something that I did not need or try to understand then and cannot quite put into words now, though it has something to do with belonging, not to a clan, or a tribe, or a nation, but to the land itself. To the place. But what place, exactly? Burntisland Links? West Fife? Scotland? At the time, none of these designations counted for very much in my small universe; what did matter was the smell off the water, the light across the firth, the shadows that gathered in the patches of woodland and wild ground that we passed on the slow bus ride home. That was what those drums spoke of, back then, and it is what they speak of now, whenever I hear them. A longing. A sense of unutterable belonging that has nothing to do with social class, or citizenship. A nostalgia for some kind of indigeneity, and the gravity that it bestows, a gravity that, for some mysterious reason, is the first prerequisite for finding a true home on this Earth.
Without necessarily seeking them out, I have witnessed all manner of Highland Games, or better still, preparations for the big day, in locations as diverse and as distant from Burntisland as Argentina, Central California and Australia. Once, on a British Council visit to Buenos Aires, I spent a fine, oddly instructive day with a group of schoolchildren, many of whom were practising for a forthcoming Games in every field of endeavour, from piping to dance to the usual tests of speed and strength – children whose souls were at least partly Scottish, by some logic of bloodline or loyalty. And yet, though their English was close to perfect, their first language, the language they used to encourage and cajole one another, was Argentine, Spanish.
Perhaps this should not have come as a surprise. We tend to think of those displaced during the Scots diaspora as colonial émigrés, shipped en masse to the United States, or to their former masters’ English-speaking colonies – particularly Canada, Australia and New Zealand – but some travelled further afield, establishing Scottish communities, as well as Scottish cultural traditions, in Chile, Brazil, Argentina and elsewhere. According to a 2018 article in Scottish Country Dancer: “Scottish roots in Argentina go back to 8 August 1825, when the sailing ship Symmetry arrived on the coast of Buenos Aires carrying the first colonists from Leith. Commanded by Captain Samuel Smith, the Symmetry brought 45 couples, 42 single men, 14 single women and 79 children to a rich agricultural area in the province of Buenos Aires called Monte Grande… Argentina takes pride in having the largest Scottish community outside the English-speaking world, with an estimated 100,000 people claiming Scottish ancestry.”
The piece goes on to note that the city of Buenos Aires has four pipe bands, whose year comes to a high point every March: “when one of the most important avenues in Buenos Aires is closed to traffic and people gather around a stage to hear the pipes and see Scottish dancing. There are stalls that sell neeps and tatties, whisky and Scottish crafts.”
This all sounds rather contrived – characterised by the same wishful blood loyalty that marks almost every Burns Night where sometimes quirky, and occasionally bizarre Haggis Suppers are rehearsed in banqueting rooms or school assembly halls from Georgia to Singapore – but what surprised me, listening to and watching these Argentine teenagers perform their own version of Scottishness, was the sheer level of their ability. However distant they now were from a homeland that most of them had never seen, they were dancing, and drumming, and piping for the joy of it, and there can be no greater test of authenticity.
We do not need to be born in a place – we do not even need to have seen it – to enter into its mythology, because myths are not historical. Myths are elective – not necessarily at the level of consciousness, but as the expression of something more fundamental and more lyrical. History is what sets us in our place, binding us to social norms and conventions and limits; myths let us roam, they make space for the imagination, for reinvention, for a sense of belonging that is not conferred by a clan name, or a verified birth certificate. And by now, in much of the world, including Scotland, Scottishness is as much myth as it is history, which means that we must guard it carefully, retell it beautifully and, more than anything else, love it wisely. How we do this, on a local level, decides how we share the world; how we do this, on the global scale, may well decide how long, and how well, we endure.
For myself, this has nothing to do with tartan, or haggis, or nationalist sentiment; but then, my own history is, at best, a garbled one. In 1965, as members of a different, more industrial Scottish diaspora, my family moved from the coalfields of West Fife to Corby in the English Midlands, where my father got a job at the Stewarts & Lloyds steelworks. A prizewinning New Town, Corby was a gathering place for economic migrants from Wales, Northern Ireland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland and elsewhere, but the majority of those who settled there were Scots – which eventually, perhaps inevitably, prompted the powers-that-be to organise the first of many Highland Gatherings at the town’s Welfare Club in 1968.
I was 13, still resentful at having been brought south and, by this time, fully engaged in a highly stereotypical performance of Scottishness, in which I stubbornly exaggerated my Kirkcaldy dialect (many of my teachers could not understand a word I spoke) while proclaiming my proven Highlander roots (my maternal grandfather’s full name had been John Cameron Burnside and, though there was no evidence that this indicated any clan connection, I decided that I had to be descended from the heroic Camerons of Lochiel, of whom it is said that more than half of their number were slain at, or immediately after, Culloden). With that in mind, I went along to that first Gathering – and though I now remember nothing of the day’s events, I do remember that it reinforced my ahistorical but fervent sense that there was something special about being Scottish, something that no English person could understand.
During the years that followed, this conversion to Romantic Scottishness – my own, and that of the town itself – continued. A tad inappropriately, the organisers held a “porridge eating competition” in the run-up to 1969’s Gathering (records show that the winner was an Irishman named John Coyle, who devoured 23 bowls of instant oatmeal in ten minutes). Never mind, we said, it’s all in a good cause – and along we went, just as we had gone along to Burntisland every year when we lived in Cowdenbeath. And though I think we were beginning to realise, in our heart of hearts, that all this tartanry and caber tossing was mostly a matter of commerce and morale-building, we also knew that, given a choice between a contrived tradition and nothing at all, we would take the simulacrum.
What we were doing, though we would not have expressed it in these terms, was participating in the creation of an invented tradition – a term coined by the historian Eric Hobsbawm, in the introduction to a book of historical essays published in 1983. Later in that same volume, in an essay entitled “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland”, Hugh Trevor-Roper notes that much of the paraphernalia of Scottishness that we now accept as authentic arose from invented traditions established by Lowlanders and Englishmen who came north to exploit the Scottish Highlands after the suppression of the 1715 rebellion – in fact, he even claims that the kilt as we now know it was designed by an English industrialist named Thomas Rawlinson, who established an iron-smelting plant at Glengarry, not far from Inverness.
Meanwhile, the notion that each clan had always had its own, distinctive tartan seems to be similarly unreliable. Indeed, the early form of Highland dress, a loose and adaptable length of plaid, might well have been distinctively patterned, but these designs had more to do with the regional home or social position of the wearer. The idea of a set tartan for each clan was, Trevor-Roper claims, an early-19th-century affair, driven by a fad for Scottish dress and “Highland” societies, not to mention commerce, with businesses seeking to cash in on the lifting of the post-1745-rebellion ban on Highland wear and tartan.
Some of Trevor-Roper’s claims have since been disputed but it is hard not to think that – what with Rawlinson’s kilt, a growing sympathy with the Highlander underdog (toothless now and, thus, no longer a threat) and the opportunistic romanticisation of the newly accessible Highlands by such cultural figures as Sir Walter Scott and the literary fraudster James Macpherson (the “discoverer” of Ossian) – Scottishness had become a theatrical enterprise, a concoction of hearsay, bad history and literary and sartorial posturing. Meanwhile, the real traditions of Scotland were increasingly diminished and, in many cases, gradually lost, replaced by a rather sickly taste for Tam o’ Shanters, tablet and tartanry that, to this day, any tourist (or homecoming migrant, like the boy I was in the late 1960s) can enjoy in the souvenir shops of Princes Street and the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, or wherever else Scotland is sold.
Setting the theatrical aspect of all this aside, however, there is something else, some honest expression of a real need, that cannot help but make itself felt at any Highland Gathering. It does not seem too fanciful to suggest that this need, this nostalgia for indigeneity is, at heart, a longing for spontaneous community; for a conviviality rooted in a shared time and place and, so, in a shared gravity. Meanwhile a consumer society prospers by convincing its citizenry that the pleasures of everyday life – of meaningful work and family and friendship, of owning a few treasured items rather than whole closets full of the latest toys, of the everyday visions to be found close at hand on what the poet Norman MacCaig calls “a corner of the road, early morning” – are so lacking in glamour and status as to be negligible, when set aside the latest technology and hippest travel destinations.
In the poem “Highland Games”, MacCaig catalogues the everyday sights and sounds of a local Games day, as:
Keepers and shepherds in their best plus-fours
who live mountains apart
exchange gossip and tall stories.
Women hand out sandwiches,
rock prams and exchange
small stories and gossip.
Those who come to the Games, many of them travelling considerable distances, are here mainly for the purpose of such exchanges, in which personal stories are validated by shared telling and a provisional sense of community, of conviviality, is re-established and nourished for a day. Meanwhile, physical feats, in which cooperation and comradeship are central to success, are executed in the “rope ring”.
These Games may be an everyday and far from glamorous event, but they connect its participants, not only to one another, but to their environment, in a shared locus where, as the American poet Marianne Moore puts it in her own evocation of a convivial community, “there is nothing that / ambition can buy or take away”. Finally, as the day ends, and the people adjourn to the bar, or to the “Games Night Dance”, the Games are rounded off in good cheer, even though, in the poem’s single elegiac note, the day ends (as it must in a country like Scotland, with its history of clearances, diaspora and social inequality) in the long walk home with people no longer here, with exiles and deaths your nearest companions. So it is that, as the crowd disperses, they set out into the darkness amongst habitual ghosts and familiars to make the long walk back to wherever they came from. But then, is it not the case that, more often than not, the longest way round is also the nearest way home?
As it happens, my family’s long walk home after Burntisland Games began with a bus ride. It was a slow journey, and we would be tired but happy, sitting with our faces pressed to the window as the ash-grey summer gloaming closed in around us. Then, finally, in almost night, we would be dropped off at Cowdenbeath for the final stage of the journey, a short but equally slow drift homeward until we came to the deep beechwoods that stood dark and tall around the old farm road that led to our wartime prefab on Blackburn Drive. I loved those woods, especially at night: tall, craggy rocks stood Pictish and dark by the side of the stony track; the undergrowth at the back of the old abattoir seemed to be full of movement and shadows; occasional tawny owls would flit overhead through the upper canopy, their screeches electrifying the night. On moonless nights, we had to make our way by guesswork and feel, sometimes sensing rather than actually picking out obstacles along the way: proof, to my child’s mind, that some vestigial animal, or maybe pagan sixth sense, still lingered on in my body, clandestine and unnamed.
On that short but careful walk, it was easy to imagine the country as it had been before we moderns arrived, when others, quicker and more sure-footed than us, had passed through a larger and more diverse woodland on their wanderings, gifted with something close to night vision and capable of navigating by patterns in the sky that they knew as well as they knew the land and the waters through which they passed. And back then, living in what remained of their world, I did not think of myself as Scottish in any of the usual ways. I had a vague sense of inhabiting something more local than a nation, and I was altogether happy to belong to that particular patch of earth, to the stony road through the beech woods, to the cries of the owls and to what Dylan Thomas once called “the close and holy darkness”.
At the end of the long walk home, when we came indoors and my mother doled out mugs of Ovaltine and Rich Tea biscuits, we thought of the place we had just visited as another country: not exactly foreign, but not ours, either, it seemed to us a dream realm composed partly of the distant past and partly of wishful thinking – and yet, at the same time, it also felt like a necessary part of our lives, an annual rite that connected us to “people no longer here”, to the close dead and those distant aunts and cousins in Australia and Canada who sent chatty letters and cards at Christmas, asking after a homeland that, for them, and for us, was more myth than memory. I do believe that, at some level, we all knew this, just as we knew that, in a world where history had mostly failed us, myth was all we had.
John Burnside (1955-2024) was a poet, critic, novelist and the New Statesman’s nature columnist. A longer version of this essay appears in “The Long Walk Home”, a book of photographs of Highland Games in Scotland and the US by Robbie Lawrence, published by Stanley/Barker
[See also: Herbs and flowers flourish in my hilltop garden, except where I want them]
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This article appears in the 25 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2024